Authors: Cynthia Bailey Pratt
“I can’t tell you. These aren’t things women need to know. It’s better for you to think of battle like the paintings that are done of it. Fat, woolly clouds of cannon smoke, patient men with clean bandages lying about in artistically contrived groups, clean-shaven generals with steady horses, and silence.”
“I’ve seen paintings like that. They’re quite popular.”
“Of course they are. A painting can’t stun and horrify you with noise so incredible you’d give your soul for a single second’s silence. But all you get is the roar of the cannon fire, the screams of the dying horses and men, and me, begging them not to be dead.”
He walked to the window, naked and unashamed. “I can’t stand the dark anymore,” he said, apparently idly. “Comes of sleeping so long in a tent, I suppose. When I returned to Brussels, I had a room in an
appartement,
and slept with the curtains closed as one should. I couldn’t stand it. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and think...”
Rietta came up behind him. Putting her arm around his waist, she leaned her head on his shoulder. “What would you think?”
He started to speak, but choked. Something wet fell to her arm, but she didn’t know if it was water, sweat, or a tear.
“I’d think ... I’d wake up and think I was dead. Buried with the others, as I should have been. I should have been.” He made an effort to shake her off, but Rietta clung.
“You said some names.”
“Did I”
“Fox, Allenby ... something Spanish?”
“Ribera.” She heard the ghost of a laugh in his chest. “He was Portuguese. Hated the Spaniards like fire but hated the French worse. He had a way with the ladies, second to none. Used to make poor old Cashman half crazy the way he could choose the most starched-up female in a party and have her mooning over him in no time. Ribera would wink with one lazy eye and tell him that one merely needed sympathy.”
Something of a foreign accent crept into his voice and Rietta could almost hear the voice of the Portuguese officer.
“Cashman was one of your friends?”
“My best friend. We joined up at the same time. God, we were young. We both thought it would be a pity to miss the adventure.”
“The adventure?” she prompted.
“Yes, and it was, too. You wouldn’t think men could enjoy war but I think we all have a sneaking liking for it. Not the battle, perhaps, though I’ve known a few who did enjoy the whiff of powder. But the rest of it—the travel, the camaraderie, the pitting of your wits against the world. Why, even the conflicts with some of the others had an enjoyable side. There was one captain who seemed to enjoy flogging his troops a little too much. We settled him. We ...” He chuffed a sigh.
“What did you do?”
“No. Definitely not for your ears. It was all Allenby’s idea, of course. He was the smartest of us. Foxy was always neat as wax. Didn’t matter where we were or what was going forward; his batman would be ironing his ludship’s neckcloths, or brushing the mud from his boots. Tompkins was just the opposite, yet you rarely saw one of them without the other.”
She encouraged him to talk about them. She could almost see them in her mind’s eye, young, playful, full of unspoken thoughts about duty and honor and the justice of the work they were doing that would have embarrassed them horribly if anyone guessed. He talked about his first time under fire, arriving in a coastal town to pick up supplies. He’d been cut by chips of rock when a bullet had just missed him.
“When I felt the blood trickling down, I remember thinking how jealous the others would be that I’d been wounded. They were, too. When I was shot at Vitoria, Fox had just escaped with his life as well when he’d stumbled over a Frenchie hiding in a ditch. There’d been a little back and forth with the Frenchie scraping Foxy’s ribs with his bayonet. I remember him cursing because his coat wouldn’t fit properly over the bandages.”
“He was a dandy?”
“Don’t let him hear... that is, no. He aspired to be Corinthian. He would have been, too. Top o’ the Trees.”
Rietta left Nick’s side to sit down on the tumbled bed. “What happened with Napoleon’s abdication?”
“We sat down at a
taverna
somewhere in the Pyrenees and had a carouse that they’re probably still talking about. I hardly remember any of it myself—except for that girl with black eyes and large ...” He gestured roundly.
“Quite a lot of this tale is not for my ears,” Rietta said, glad that he’d had an opportunity to enjoy life after the tribulation of the long war in the Peninsula. Then she thought,
Good heavens, I’m not the slightest bit jealous of that girl he had. I must be more in love than even I knew.
He laughed and joined her on the bed. “Almost none of it. After that, I came home for a time. So did Tompkins; his father was something in politics and wanted to show off his son. Then we rejoined the regiment in time to go to Holland. From there, we were sent to Belgium when word came that Napoleon had left Elba and was moving north.”
“Then came Waterloo.” She wondered if it would ever be forgotten. She supposed it might be, one day, if there were more and bigger wars. No one had ever told her before that men could have a sneaking liking for war.
“Then came it all—Charleroi, Quatre Bras, Chateau de Hougoumont. Amazing how much of what we were fighting over was some respectable farm the day before. By the time we were through, they were roofless shells with holes you could have driven cattle through.”
“My father read us the reports when they were published in the newspaper. He even sent for a fortnight’s worth of the
Times,
an organ he ordinarily abominates.”
“What did he think of it all?”
“What everyone thinks. A glorious action that threw down the Monster once and for all.”
“Yes, I suppose it had to be done. Napoleon never should have tried to defeat us. You know, the first time we beat him, he was offered all of France to the borders of 1802, and he wouldn’t accept the terms.”
“He was a horrid man.”
He laughed again. “To say the least.”
“Don’t laugh.” She knocked her shoulder into him. “You can’t deny he was odious. What’s the use of being an emperor anyway?”
“I don’t know. I’ve done with wanting to make more of my life than God intended. It would take a command from Wellington himself to move me from Greenwood now. If you’re hoping to spend your seasons in London, you’ll go without me.”
“I have no ambition myself, except one.” She didn’t speak of it, but ever since he’d told her she might be pregnant she had wanted his child. Even when she was furious with him, that yearning still grew in her. She should have refused him in the dining room, but a combination of desire, maternal hopes, and pity had created an inability to refuse him. Thinking of those impassioned moments, the hard and gleaming table under her, Nick above her, his eyes closed in surrender, she pressed her hand to her mouth to stifle a moan.
Now wasn’t the lime to give in to her feelings again. Not when he’d finally begun to talk to her about the events of June 15, nearly a year and half ago.
“What part of the battle were you in, Nick?”
“I beg your pardon?” he spoke against the waves of her hair. He gathered the strands together. He dusted her neck with the thick end, as if he held a huge paintbrush and was painting her with light.
“Stop it. That tickles.”
“Does it? I shall have to remember that. You wriggle so delightfully.”
“Nick...”
“No more,” he said, smiling. “The sun will be rising soon and I’ve yet to accomplish the thing I promised.”
“What thing?”
“Making, love to you in my bed. Call me reactionary, but I want a pillow for your head, a blanket to cover you, and a mattress to protect your soft buttocks.” He grinned. “Don’t be so shocked. They are soft, aren’t they?”
“I wouldn’t know.” She strove to be prim once more, but how could she when he’d seen her passionate impulses?
“Then take my word for it. I’ve stroked more than a few and yours is the softest I’ve ever met with.”
“Hmph. If you’ve had so much experience, you don’t need any more tests. I’ll go along to my room now, Sir Nicholas, if you don’t mind.”
“I shan’t sleep a wink if you go. I’ve learned my lesson about that.’
“I shan’t get any sleep if I stay. My lesson is just as new as yours, but mine runs deeper.”
“How much deeper?” He slid his arm around her waist and began to explore the skin exposed by the open throat of her nightdress. He seemed to have developed a fascination with her shoulder, one she began to share as he trailed his fingertips over the soft skin. He smiled down at her as her head fell back onto his shoulder. She reached up, above and behind her head, determined not to let an opportunity to kiss him slip by.
“Nick ...,” she said dreamily as his hand dipped lower, seeking new territory to explore. He hummed a reply. “Did any of your friends leave widows?”
He took his hands away, leaving Rietta feeling a little empty and foolish. If only she’d waited to ask—waited until he was in a melting mood. Now he withdrew, not physically, for he still held her, but emotionally. Rietta felt a strange chill settle into the room.
“Yes. And even those without wives had sisters and sweethearts, all of them praying as hard as could be for their men to return alive. They wouldn’t have cared if he came back missing an arm, a leg, or an eye. I tried to convince Cashman that his Anne wouldn’t care if he lost his arm, but he was so sure he’d be an object of disgust.”
“Cashman lost an arm?” Though she’d never met him, she suddenly felt as though she’d heard horrible news about her dearest friend. Tears stung her eyes. “How?”
“A shell burst. One moment he was there, on his horse, the next he was on the ground, holding what was left of a shattered arm. He died in a quarter-hour and said it was better that way.... I didn’t tell her that when I wrote to her.”
“You wrote to her? You wrote to them all, didn’t you? That’s how you know about wives and sweethearts.”
He nodded. There were no tears on his face. She knew all his tears had dried up long ago.
“It was the only thing I could do for them. My ... my penance, if you like.”
“Penance? For what? For living?”
“You must see how unfair it is that I should be alive, living with my family in my family house, married to you, making love to you ...”
“While they are dead.”
She fell his back grow rigid once again. “Yes,” he breathed.
Rietta sat beside him in silence. Platitudes, easy and quick, came to her lips but she had sense enough not to utter them. This was not the time for the gently thoughtless phrases that wrapped and muted grief. She vividly recalled the most un-Christian hatred she’d felt toward those well-meaning women who’d murmured, “she’s in heaven now” and “you wouldn’t have wanted her to go on when she was in such pain.” Of course she had. She cared for nothing beyond the fact that her mother was dead.
He would hate her if she reminded him that they’d died for a great cause, or that they had suffered a hero’s death.
Slowly, seeking the right words, she said, “I feel as though I’ve lost something precious that I never knew I had. I won’t know them. They won’t come here. I’ll never meet their wives, dandle their children, hear their stories about you.” She smiled, her face wet with tears. “I’ll wager they had some marvelous stories about you—things you would have paid them never to tell me.”
He laughed but it was cut short, as if he were afraid to be laughing now. Then, bravely, softly, he chuckled. “I would have paid it gladly. Anything rather than let you hear the story about the goose, the donkey, and the general’s lady. Tompkins could imitate a goose better than anyone I ever heard of in my life.”
They lay back together on the bed, Rietta’s head on his chest, while he told her the little things that had happened in between campaigns. The struggle to eradicate the bedbugs and other vermin that accumulated every time they bivouacked in a Spanish household; the rage of MacMurray the batman upon discovering a cook using the last of
his
salt; a chance meeting with Wellington himself, were perhaps no more fit for her ears than stories of lusty village maidens, but they gave Rietta a clearer picture of war than any newspaper article puffing off the glories of the army.
She listened to him until he fell asleep, suddenly between one word and the next. Still she lay there, cherishing him, hoping by her presence to guard him from his demons. She did not sleep until the sky was streaked with red. He had not, so far as she could tell, dreamed.
In the morning, Nick woke late. Yawning and stretching, he knew the bed was empty except for him. Blinking, he felt a sense of disorientating as though the bed had been spun around in the night, leaving him facing a new direction. He chuckled. Rietta had been having that effect on him since the day they’d met.
He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Then he frowned as he opened them. The worn green curtains in his room were pulled across the windows, blocking out the sunshine. Yet there seemed to be plenty of light.
Nick looked around and saw that the door between his bedroom and Rietta’s stood wide open. He could hear her singing some Italian song and the sound of splashing. Swinging his feet out from beneath the covers and reaching for his dressing gown, he went to her only to pause on the threshold, spellbound.
The highly painted tin bath stood before a blazing fire. Rietta’s hair hung over the lip, pouring down like a river of fire. He’d never heard her sing before and found her voice to be lighter than when she spoke. As she soaped her long, pale leg, raising it in the air to reach around with the sponge, she sang,
“lo sono docile, son rispettosa, sono obbediente, dolce, amorosa
...”
Nick laughed, despite the mouth-drying desire he felt for her. The water splashed as she twisted around to look at him. “Oh, you’re awake at last.”
“Docile, respectful, obedient, and sweet? That song was not written for you.”
“I am loving, however, I hope.”
“Mmm, that I can’t argue with.” He came around to the front of the bath to gaze in delight at the gleaming beauty of Rietta in her bath. At the same time, he became aware that he could probably use a good dose of clean water himself.